


Bridge

by cal1brations



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alcohol, Established Relationship, M/M, Past Lives, Past Relationship(s), Recreational Drug Use, Wedding Rings, in a sense?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-01
Updated: 2016-02-01
Packaged: 2018-05-17 14:38:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5874424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cal1brations/pseuds/cal1brations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>He doesn’t want to know for many reasons. It feels weird to know that Nate was a person with an entire life before Hancock was ever even a thought. It feels wrong to know that, in his current disaster of an existence, Hancock has been here to fill the void of having everything ripped away from him, and <i>that</i> doesn’t feel good to think about. A void-filler. Better than a junkie or a stoner, maybe, but not by much.</p>
</blockquote>In which Nate forgets (<i>forgets</i>?) to mention that, whoops, he was actually married before the war. Hancock thinks many things about this development, but the majority can be summed up with a long, uncertain-sounding sigh.
            </blockquote>





	Bridge

As usual, Nate is carrying too much to be physically possible to carry.

Their pace is suffering because of it, and there’s no way they’re going to get back to Goodneighbor before nightfall, which is not really something Hancock is too keen on. If Nate’s going slow now, that means if they get attacked (and, trust him, if they’re going this slow? They will _definitely_ be attacked), they’re going to be blown to bits, and Hancock isn’t about to let that happen.

So, he nudges Nate’s arm with his elbow, watching Nate stop and heft his satchel over his shoulders a bit better.

“Here, let me carry some of that,” Hancock tells him, gesturing to his very-barren self. “I got the space.”

Nate seems to contemplate this for a long moment, but all of a sudden he seems to slam his bag to the ground—Hancock figures it was falling and Nate finally let it down off his back—with a loud sigh of relief. He stands up straight, hands at the small of his back as he stretches, groans out a low, “Holy _shit_ , that’s heavy,” that makes Hancock’s thoughts wander, but not so much so that he forgets what they’re doing (for now).

Hancock moves to open up Nate’s rucksack, digging through the lightweight items at the top—food, ammo—and goes for the heavy stuff closer to the bottom. He stuffs a few guns into his own satchel, grinning up at Nate as he tries to take the man’s pride and joy, some pistol he’s modified to hell and back. The glare Nate gives him as he roughly twists the cap off a Nuka Cola is enough to make Hancock laugh as he tucks the pistol back in Nate’s bag and continues riffling around for things he can take.

“There’s some ammo for that rifle,” Nate points out between chugs of his pop, nodding to the small pocket on the side of his bag. “I don’t need it.”

So Hancock moves to take that out. Except he ends up with a handful of loose screws and fuses and other tiny, stupid items before Nate can tell him he’s opening the wrong pocket, and Hancock shoots the man a lopsided grin as he holds fistfuls of… stuff.

“Heh,” Hancock barely gets out as Nate moves to help him, picking up what has slipped through Hancock’s fingers and starts shoving it back into the pocket on the bag. “Guess I wasn’t payin’ attention. Sorry.”  At least it wasn’t a rip, Hancock thinks gratefully.

Carefully, Hancock moves in with his hands to start pouring trinkets back into the pouch that Nate is holding open for him, making sure to drop as little as humanly possible. A few pieces escape him, but Hancock empties his handfuls of Nate’s things before patting through the rubble of the concrete they’re squatted over for what he dropped.

He spots Nate’s dog tags, which he probably took off before they went barreling into the last settlement that needed their help; necklaces are really only good for choking in a struggle, after all. Hancock picks up the chain and gives it a quick glance—he’s never actually noticed all of it since it’s usually tucked under Nate’s clothing, but he’s surprised at how shiny the tags look.

As well as the—

“Woah,” Hancock whistles. “ _Shit_ , Nate—that’s an impressive little ring!”

He turns his head to look at Nate, grinning as he holds up the necklace in vague explanation for his outburst.

However, Nate is not grinning back. Nate looks about as horrified as Hancock has ever seen him, eyes bugged wide as he reaches for the necklace and yanks it from Hancock’s hand, so violently that Hancock practically lets go of the thing before Nate’s fist is on it; he’s almost certain Nate wouldn’t have hesitated to snap his wrist to get it away from him.

Nate looks the necklace over for himself, and Hancock watches him with a degree of disturbance. It’s just a—

Ring.

And Nate wears a ring.

On his left ring finger.

Where _wedding_ _rings_ are worn.

“Oh shit,” Hancock finds the words falling out of his mouth faster than he can accurately think them, and he watches Nate look to him with a look of mild terror—more like anxiety, Hancock thinks. Because Hancock knows something he wasn’t supposed to know, it seems, and Hancock has lots of experience in that department.

Generally with drug lords or the likes, not with a lover keeping secrets, but still.

“Hancock—“

“ _Shit_ ,” Hancock laughs out, awkwardly so. He runs a hand over his face, drops his gaze off to the side, and laughs again. It’s still very awkward. Nate doesn’t say anything. Hancock doesn’t even know what to say.

It’s never clicked before, the ring, the goddamn _ring_! Why is he surprised with this development, anyway? Nate’s… well, he’s not exactly a spring chicken (and definitely not nowadays, if only in actual age), and he mentioned before at some point that he wasn’t nearly the type of person to be kicking around with people like Hancock pre-war. That _had_ to mean something, and Hancock wants to kick himself for being too stupid (alright, to be fair, too high) to really make the connection before.

Mostly because Nate looks like he might be trying to avoid screaming, and Hancock doesn’t really know how to deal with a situation like this, so they… just don’t say anything.

Hancock finishes evening out the loot between the two of them. Nate thanks him in a tone that makes Hancock squirm in a really awful way, like tainted chem-kind of squirm, and they head back out to make the rest of the trek back to Goodneighbor.

(Nate smashes the Nuka Cola bottle against a ruined building when he finishes it; Hancock tries not to wonder what that means, and shivers uncomfortably at the soft sound of glass raining down to the pavement.)

* * *

Nate doesn’t wear the necklace under his shirt anymore after that, and Hancock isn’t sure if it’s to send a message—a distinct _We Are_ Not _Together_ message—or because Nate doesn’t feel the need to stuff it under his clothes anymore. Either way, Hancock wants to pluck his eyes out of his head every time he catches his gaze wandering from Nate’s face down the lines of his throat, to the dip of the necklace where Nate’s dog tags and the ring rest against his chest.

They both avoid having an actual conversation about it.

Hancock thinks he’s going to need a _lot_ of chems to deal with the conversation that they should probably have. Lethal amounts of chems, probably.

* * *

Lucky him, Nate starts the conversation after a few drinks, after Nate’s swallowed two lovely little drops of Day Tripper and can barely sit up, so he lies down on his back next to the sofa in Hancock’s… office (read: shithole).

He’s playing with the necklace with very careful fingers, and Hancock isn’t nearly as fucked up as he’d like to be when he hears Nate tell him, “I was married—y’know, before...”

“I know,” Hancock mumbles, slouching into his seat. He’s got a bottle of ale in his hand and no more Day Tripper for himself, but he’s almost drunk, so at least he’s not trying to brave this conversation with any means of sobriety. Though, Hancock thinks wistfully, how _nice_ it would be to be so high that conversation couldn’t be achieved. The dream, indeed.

“Her name was N—“

“ _Nate_ ,” Hancock snaps, though the slur in his tone rounds it out. “I don’t wanna know her name. I don’t wanna know anythin’ about it.”

Silence. Then the sound of Nate dragging himself up into a sitting position via aid from the edge of the sofa, then Hancock’s knee. He’s frowning, a big, deep frown that looks comical on his features, and Hancock slides his gaze to Nate with little amusement.

“Why not?” Nate asks him, brows furrowed. “I wanna tell you.”

Hancock sighs, loud, and slouches deeper into the sofa, shaking his head. He doesn’t want to know for many reasons. It feels weird to know that Nate was a person with an entire life before Hancock was ever even a thought. It feels wrong to know that, in his current disaster of an existence, Hancock has been here to fill the void of having everything ripped away from him, and _that_ doesn’t feel good to think about. A void-filler. Better than a junkie or a stoner, maybe, but not by much.

He doesn’t want to think of how miniscule he could be in the scheme of Nate’s life—lives, really. His pre and post, his before and after.

One life where he had it all, a pretty girl and everything wonderful, and one life where he spends his nights fucking a zombie-esque drug enthusiast in the middle of a literal fucking wasteland.

“Hancock,” Nate says, and it takes a minute to register his name; maybe he’s a little more drunk than he thought. He looks to Nate again, watching the man give his knee a squeeze—not sexual, but comforting. Hancock does not understand why.

“ _You_ mean _everything_ to me, now,” Nate’s telling him in a mumble that could almost be bashful, but Hancock thinks it’s more because of the chems than anything. It’s sincere, at least, and Hancock almost makes a quip, but Nate continues before he can speak. “And you told me about your shit—I should… I _should_ tell you about… mine. I wanna.”

 _Sure didn’t fucking seem like you wanted to before_ , is the only thing Hancock can think, and it’s so bitter and nasty in his head, he frowns at himself for even thinking it. Hancock sighs loudly then, because Nate is making a face that is just as sincere at is it intoxicated, and the only thing Hancock can think to say to that is, “Alright.”

So Nate sits up a little better, leaning against the sofa (against Hancock’s left leg, moreso than the edge of the sofa) as he starts to recount something that Hancock only vaguely understands with a very quiet, “I had everything pre-war folks would ever want.”

The way he talks about time before the war is weird, Hancock thinks. Nate looks a little wistful, a little solemn, as he tells Hancock about the war, about his time spent working for a government that had little concern for him and his family—a literal, entire _family_ , which makes Hancock’s heart leap up into his throat and almost makes him vomit.

A son that Nate pointedly avoids speaking too much about (Hancock wonders why, but does not comment), and a wife.

A wife that Nate loved _so_ much. A wife whose name was Nora, Nate tells him with this wide, dopey grin, misty eyes and all. He waves his hands around when he talks about her, as if trying to gesture to how incredible she probably was, though the ghost Nate uses for reference is lost on Hancock. Nate tells Hancock how awkward he was around women, and how Nora used to make him laugh so hard, on their wedding day she had him snorting champagne out his nose, and that, to be fair, makes Hancock laugh a little, too. Nate tells him that she was very pretty and that the last thing he remembers saying to her is that they’ll be okay, come on, honey.

“She was the only reason I even walked out of that pod,” Nate tells him quietly. His forehead is resting against Hancock’s knee, and Hancock debates for a long moment before he reaches to smooth a hand over Nate’s back, squeeze comfortingly at the base of his neck. He doesn’t understand, he really doesn’t know how Nate’s dragged his own ass this far after all of that—after _losing_ all of that—and there are not very many words that Hancock feels he can say. “I didn’t know what the hell I was gonna do, but—I had to do _something_. I had to, for both of them—she would’ve kicked my ass if I just sat there and died, too.”

Nate sits up after sucking in a breath (probably swallowing back tears, Hancock thinks sympathetically). He looks at Hancock seriously as he speaks directly to him, this time.

“I’m never gonna have any of that back,” Nate tells him. “None of that.”

Hancock, understanding the truth in the statement, nods.

Nate is frowning, but not completely out of sadness. More like understanding, acknowledgement. Maybe he’s never had anyone to validate this truth for him until now. Maybe that makes Hancock the bad guy, in a way.

“But I got _this_ ,” Nate says, and Hancock feels his face pull a look of confusion. Nate slowly lifts himself from the floor with a long grunt, moving to flop right beside Hancock on the sofa. He flicks a hand between them, back and forth. “You ‘n me.”

Hancock is surprised with this. Mostly because he’s listened to Nate recount his previous, perfect life for the past hour, and now Nate seems okay to recognize he’s living in a shithole, has a thing for a guy whose looks are not far off from a rotting corpse, and seems pretty okay with that. That’s… a little alarming. Baffling.

“You an’ me…” Hancock repeats, a little slower, letting the words roll around in his mouth. He likes that. He _wants_ that. Nate is one of the greatest things he’s got, if he’s honest.

This seems a little unreal. Hancock actually pats his pockets to check for any inhalers, needles, anything, but all there is on him is the bottle of ale in his hand; probably not a hallucination, then. He presses his tongue against the backs of his teeth for good measure—he can feel it, he doesn’t jerk awake.

Nate’s pulling him close by the collar of his shirt, letting his warm hand slip under the frills and cup Hancock’s neck, gently turning Hancock’s head towards him to bump their foreheads together. Hancock’s tricorn bumps back in the process, but he’s not very concerned about it while Nate’s lips are ghosting over his own.

“I shouldn’t be this lucky,” Nate mumbles, and tries to kiss him, but Hancock can’t help the squawk of a laugh that leaves him, ruining it. Nate pulls back a little, brows furrowed comically in confusion, and Hancock grins lopsidedly at him, amazed.

“ _You_ shouldn’t be this lucky? You gotta be fuckin’—“ He laughs again, greatly amused with this concept. “You’re playing me right now. _Lucky_. Holy shit, Nate. If anyone’s the lucky one here, it’s _my_ sorry ass.”

Nate shakes his head almost automatically, a smile slowly growing on his features. “No one deserves two lifetimes,” he says. Then he leans in again, close but not close enough, and Hancock moves a hand to slide around Nate’s broad shoulders, keeping him there.

“No one deserves two lifetimes with two people they love _this_ _much_ , either,” Nate finishes, and Hancock grins brilliantly before they’re kissing again, slow and easy, like they have all the time in the world. Hancock fists at Nate’s shirt, and allows it when Nate slowly presses him back to lie down, setting his drink down on the floor before wrapping himself completely in Nate’s affections for the evening.

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like... well, if it's not obvious by now, this is my own Sole Survivor and I just slap "Nate" on him so that people don't feel too estranged reading about him and all his misadventures lol. Will I ever use my sosu's real name? Idk but I never shut the fuck up about him, so. We'll see, lol.


End file.
